Not Just a Fairness Problem: Lotteries Warp Our Minds

James Poulos
, ContributorPolitical theory and strategy that works for American humansOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

He comes for your soul.

By now we all know the argument that lotteries actually hurt the poor. Actually, they hurt us all.

As Fox News relishes, "Barack Obama slammed the Illinois lottery" as a State Senator, warning that it "targeted 'lower income' people who spent money they 'don't necessarily have[.]'" But as Henry Blodget points out at Business Insider, there's more afoot than a 'fairness problem'.

Even though Americans making $13,000 or less drop a sigh-inducing 9% of their income on lottery tickets each year, according to a study reported by PBS, the adverse psychological impact of lotteries may be more significant than these lost wages. Rather than simply being stupid, poor gamblers (yes, lotteries are gambling) more likely jump at "any chance at radically improving their circumstances," on the theory that any chance is "probably better than having no chance."

Yet there are any number of longshot decisions and behaviors that could result in a better shot at greater prosperity than buying a lottery ticket. The twisted genius of lottery tickets is that, per purchase, their non-financial opportunity costs are so low. Is there really a better way to spend that thirty seconds of time it takes to purchase a tiny shot at a huge payday? Yet the cumulative psychological cost of buying and hoping, again and again, instead of allocating that focus, discipline, and persistence of aim in other ways, is probably far greater than we've given credit for.

Importantly, this isn't an effect that's restricted to the poor. Blodget asks provocatively whether government has "discovered a magical way to tax people -- one in which even anti-tax crusaders voluntarily choose to pay huge taxes in exchange for a minuscule chance of making a killing?" Even more provocatively, we can ask whether, with lotteries, government has stumbled upon a way of dramatically increasing its power more in a psychological than a monetary way.

After all, the most striking feature of lotteries, especially the multi-million-dollar events, is that they conflate fate and the state. One needn't obsess over Shirley Jackson's notorious, dystopian tale about a particularly malevolent lottery to fear the subtle yet profound effect on society of ritually mixing up the fickleness of fortune and the arbitrary agency of government. Religion often holds out the promise of transformative moments that can lead to spiritual salvation -- in exchange for a lifetime of living in adherence to a disciplinary creed. Through lotteries, government holds out the promise of worldly salvation in exchange for an action that might be a whim and might be a long-held habit. As Joshua Mitchell has observed:

However noble may be the cause toward which the revenues are directed, [lotteries] foster an indigence of soul that must be overcome if democratic liberty is to thrive. In the service of revenue, they undermine the very idea of an extended temporal horizon -- without which rational action becomes wholly inconceivable.

This insight leads in striking directions. Religion helps foster long-term thinking, thereby at least potentially strengthening rationality; secular rationalism, aligned with liberty and against statism, itself finds strong reason to oppose government lotteries; and individuals not implacably opposed to 'a role for government' in helping Americans succeed will agree with Mitchell that "long-term goals ought to be established by government in order to develop and fortify" habitual long-term thinking: "Profoundly more important than their 'costs and benefits' are the effect [government-established long-term goals] have on the temporal horizon of the democratic soul [or psyche]."

For Mitchell, what really matters is "the invisible and fragile capital" on which rational action, and thus economic power, is predicated.

Though lotteries reveal a path toward psychological servility more quietly powerful than anything reflected in a CBO report, they also suggest that people like us in a democratic time will need stronger and stronger secular aids in long-term thinking, and that some of them may have to come from government. Those of us who fear our inability to limit the temptation of psychological reliance on government to this kind of function will have to do a better job of demonstrating how the private sector can inculcate long-term thinking on truly public scale. Of course, to achieve that, the private sector requires a certain sort of culture, deeply religious or not. And so long as lotteries continue to flourish, that culture will eventually fade further out of reach than that $640 million jackpot.